The Life Of Pablo is a bit of a mixed bag – it’s difficult to find any coherence and the majority of the production would be described generously as
Kanye West “The Life of Pablo”
My favourite at the moment is the weird and wonderful house track that closes the album called Fade. Fade is getting a lot of heat at the moment, and is being proclaimed as Kanye’s Worst Track™. Now I’m a contrarian at the best of times, but Kanye West “Fade” is a fucking solid piece of house music. In fact I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to call it the best house track I’ve heard in the past five years or so. What it’s doing on a hiphop album released in 2015 2016 I don’t know.
Fade has a very steady 4/4 beat, plodding along for a mere three minutes, and underpinned by the least ‘hiphop’ synth bass. I would never have guessed this was a Yeezy track, but that’s no bad thing. There’s a very poorly time stretched vocal sample (your love is fade / I feel it fade) that is used as the main hook, layered against Kanye’s heavily autotuned vocal (when no one ain’t around, I think I think too much). I chopped female vocal stab is then layered against some soul backing vocals and lots of digital delay giving it a 90’s house vibe.
I think it’s really interesting that Fade was included on The Life Of Pablo, but it’s such a lovely little track that I guess Ye thought it was too good not to use. That could be the case for the majority of the efforts on TLOP.]